Realizing Metaphors

Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet

David M. Bethea

Publication Year: 1998

Readers often have regarded with curiosity the creative life of the poet. In this passionate and authoritative new study, David Bethea illustrates the relation between the art and life of nineteenth-century poet Alexander Pushkin, the central figure in Russian thought and culture. Bethea shows how Pushkin, on the eve of his two-hundredth birthday, still speaks to our time. He indicates how we as modern readers might "realize"— that is, not only grasp cognitively, but feel, experience—the promethean metaphors central to the poet's intensely "sculpted" life. The Pushkin who emerges from Bethea's portrait is one who, long unknown to English-language readers, closely resembles the original both psychologically and artistically. Bethea begins by addressing the influential thinkers Freud, Bloom, Jakobson, and Lotman to show that their premises do not, by themselves, adequately account for Pushkin's psychology of creation or his version of the "life of the poet." He then proposes his own versatile model of reading, and goes on to sketches the tangled connections between Pushkin and his great compatriot, the eighteenth-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin. Pushkin simultaneously advanced toward and retreated from the shadow of his predecessor as he created notions of poet-in-history and inspiration new for his time and absolutely determinative for the tradition thereafter.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

Psychologically speaking, we all live on the inhabitable parts of a
land bordered by crueler climatic zones called the "literal" and the "figurative."
Explain the tangle of emotion and thought that is the true "us" by reference...

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

ABBREVIATIONS

PART I: Realizing Metaphors,
Situating Pushkin

Why Pushkin?

There are all the predictable ways our moment has at its disposal to
gauge this leap - is it into the "text"? into "life"? into an "info-byte"? - but
let us start with the obvious. Poetry as we know it is dying. Literally. Indeed,
one doesn't have to be a Nietzsche to imagine a time when it will be dead....

The Problem of Poetic Biography

"All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family
is unhappy in its own way." These words belong to one of the greatest of all
prose writers and - one has to imagine the connection is not fortuitous - one
of the most demanding ethical thinkers in any tradition. Prose, ethics, verisimilitude,
a stripping away of illusion, "telling it like it is" - these qualities...

Freud: The Curse of the Literally Figurative

One of the hallmarks of a "primitive" as opposed to modern (or
postmodern) approach to language is that deity speaks through the poet or
priest: the metacognitive assumption is that there is a "transcendental signifier"
(note our era's paralinguistic phrasing) out there and...

Bloom: The Critic as Romantic Poet

As I tried to argue in the previous section, there is a literalism
(which at the same time can be completely reversible and hence a pure figuralism)
about the Freudian mythos that makes it difficult to accept as continuously
operative...

Jakobson: Why the Statue Won't Come to Life, or Will It?

Schools in the "human sciences" are bound virtually by their own
phylogenetic principles to undermine and supersede their predecessors rather
than disinterestedly, patiently, build on them. A prior school has to be razed
and then a new one erected on the same spot, with the "school board" quickly
forgetting the attractions and the still usable space of the now nonexistent...

Lotman: The Code and Its Relation to Literary Biography

Perhaps no two thinkers in the latter decades of the twentieth century
have changed more our ability to conceptualize Russian literature, the
Russian literary context, and ultimately verbal reality regardless of national
origins, than Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and Yuri Lotman (1922-93). Yet,
once outside the orbit of Russian literature specialists...

PART II: Pushkin, Derzhavin, and the Life of the Poet

Why Derzhavin?

Perhaps the greatest mystery of Pushkin's life was, as I argued in the
preceding section, his death, or at least the manner in which he set the terms
of his potential demise. In a matter of months after penning the Stone Island
cycle, a series of lyrics that in their internal progression put the poet's life and
legacy in perspective with great valedictory power and restrained...

1814-1815

Given the temporal limitations of any biography, there are just three
stances or orienting attitudes that a poet can have toward a predecessorP If a
poet is beginning a career, he can experience the model as a point from which
to commence his "creative path" (tvorcheskii put); here the future is maximally
open, to the extent that the younger poet himself...

1825-1826

Pushkin's subsequent "encounters" with Derzhavin, now no longer
in the flesh, fall neatly into three temporal clusters, each one important for
his development as writer and thinker: 1825-26, 1830-31, and 1836. The first of
these clusters, played out against the background of the poet's northern exile
and the Decembrist uprising, is associated with Delvig and Kiichelbecker...

1830-1831

The Boldino autumn of 1830 marks the next important encounter
with the ghost of Derzhavin. These weeks of unprecedented creative activity
were for Pushkin deeply and eerily transitional: preoccupied by, among other
things, his "descent to prose," the poet was pursued by anxieties about his
coming marriage, fearful for the safety of his fiancee (the epidemic of "cholera...

1836

In the last part of this study, I will compare three works of 1836 in the
context of Nashchokin's recollection: "My Hero's Genealogy" (Rodoslovnaia
moego geroia, pub. 1836), The Captain's Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka, wr.
1832-36, pub. 1836); and "Exegi monumentum" (wr. 1836).141 The compositional
history of these works and others closely related to them stretches back...

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